1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of storing information on optical media, and more particularly to a system and method for optical media information storage life tracking.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems often generate relatively large quantities of information for storage, particularly in the use of multimedia applications, such as applications that generate or store picture, video or audio information. Although hard disc drive storage capacity has increased over the past several years to satisfy the permanent storage needs of many information handling system users, portable magnetic disc storage capacity has remained largely stagnant. As a result, information handling system users are increasingly turning to optical storage media as a more practical solution for storing information in a portable manner. Optical storage media generally stores information by modification of optical material with a laser and reads information by illuminating the optical material with the laser and measuring the laser light reflected from the optical material. Optical storage media come in a variety of forms including compact discs (CD) that use infrared lasers for storing and reading information, digital versatile discs (DVD) that use red lasers and Blu-Ray discs (BD) that use blue lasers for storing and reading information. As the wavelength of the laser decreases in size, the optical media is generally capable of storing greater quantities of information.
One difficulty with the use of optical media is that a wide variety of materials and designs are often used to manufacture optical media so that optical disc drives will often write information with varying quality to different optical media, depending upon the types of material and design used in the optical media. Manufacturers typically test each type of optical media as it becomes available in order to identify relevant characteristics of the optical media. For instance, manufacturers often develop specific write strategies that vary the parameters used to write information with the laser, such as the power setting for the laser, based on the characteristics of the optical media. Typically, such information is stored in optical disc drive firmware by association with a unique identification code for each type of optical media. The unique identification code is embedded in the optical media using a standardized format so that the optical disc drive is able to read the identification code from an inserted optical medium and lookup relevant information from the firmware.
Another difficulty that arises with the use of optical media is that optical media has a limited lifespan. Indeed, the specific lifespan of different types of optical media may vary substantially based on the quality of the materials and process used in manufacture. For instance, optical media fail after different life spans due to oxidation of underlying materials, such as aluminum, with the rate of oxidation dependent upon the degree to which impurities penetrate the optical media material. Although the typical life span of an optical media is generally many years, users have increasingly come to rely on optical media for archival purposes that involve long term storage of information. Even if information handling system users are aware of the limited life span of information archived on optical media so that the users will re-archive the information as the medium's useful life expires, the expiration of a particular optical medium may depend upon a number of factors that are difficult for a user to track, particularly over the extensive life of an optical medium. For instance, as an optical medium ages, the rate of errors increase so that a user may apply different expiration dates based on the relative importance of the information. As another example of the difficulty of tracking an optical medium's expiration, the expiration may vary depending upon the manufacture date of the optical medium, the initialization date on which a recordable or rewriteable optical medium is first written or stamped, or the number of times a rewriteable optical medium has information re-written.